A Crowd of Voices

A Crowd of Voices Stephen J. Williams

A Crowd of Voices was first published by Pariah Press in 1985. It won the Fellowship of Australian Writers’ Anne Elder Award and the Association for the Study of Australian Literature’s Mary Gilmore Award.

for Deanna H.

Acknowledgement for work that has been published or broadcast previously, sometimes in a different form, is due to Ash Magazine Author’s Proof, 5UV Big Bang Brave New Word  e Bulletin Christians Writing Faith in Life A First Hearing, ABC Image  e Listener Luna LiNQ Meanjin Melbourne Chronicle Nation Review Overland P76 Quadrant Southern Review 3PBS-FM Turnstyle Writers’ Radio, 3CR Writers’ Radio, 5UV Your Friendly Fascist

Contents

e High Price of Travelling........................................................................................................5 e Whole Year Travelling ..........................................................................................................6 Hunger.......................................................................................................................................................7 Epic Red....................................................................................................................................................8 “Stroke of the Eye” ...........................................................................................................................10 Burning Poem ....................................................................................................................................11 Death by Drowning ........................................................................................................................13 e Weight of Freedom .............................................................................................................14 Talking Heads ....................................................................................................................................15 —————————S.....................................................................................................................16 Waiting...................................................................................................................................................17 Report on the Ministers ...............................................................................................................19 e English Garden........................................................................................................................20 Of Clouds and Lévi-Strauss..........................................................................................................21 Floating on Water............................................................................................................................22 Big Orchestra......................................................................................................................................23 X equals X .............................................................................................................................................25 Days Dressed in Dream and Black Wire...........................................................................30 Our Winter Solstice .......................................................................................................................32 Our Life in the Prophesy of E.B. White..............................................................................34 Poems from Psychoanalysis........................................................................................................36 e Poetry of Wallace Stevens................................................................................................43 Mario Giacomelli’s SCANNO....................................................................................................44 e K-Tel Instant Love Poem and Cigarette Machine............................................47 Is Sex Important?..............................................................................................................................48 aer Invocation..................................................................................................................................49 Connibalismia.....................................................................................................................................50 Bananas ...................................................................................................................................................52 Ode to John Tranter.......................................................................................................................53 Love ..........................................................................................................................................................58 Being Sunday.......................................................................................................................................60 e Possibilities of Language ....................................................................................................61 e Living Room .............................................................................................................................64

1

î‚Š e High Price of Travelling Even though our eyes are bruised from reading all the daily news, we think of Rome and Paris in the Springtime, of telephoning long lost friends, of leaving our hearts on tables in expensive restaurants.

We are like terrorists edging toward some word of reason our commander never speaks.

We begin by opening a book on holidays in Uganda, which has a preface telling how to sit quietly in living room chairs while they become electric with possibilities, and read a chapter showing how to move our eyes to the corner of their sockets so that we can look (without having the appearance of looking) at things we do not want to see, then ick the pages for some clue on how to get there, but all we ďŹ nd are reasons not to go.

It is yet another year of no holidays in Uganda, where we could travel with lists of missing persons, sit and look at complacent animals burning in the hot light, and the chance of not seeing ourselves would be unlikely.

 e Whole Year Travelling for Paul Pacino,  ailand

“I’ve been trying to say this for years And find it like a spider on my lip: Arriving, there’s a padlock on the door Protecting nothing but a window In one wall, and a double bed Complete with holes—none of which I need.

My agent provides this free.  e squalor And the shit coming for me: hurt dogs Squeal in the street below; Vespas spew smoke  rough every crack; and prostitutes repeat  eir life, life-long story in chopped up verse.

“I drop on the bed aer a whole year travelling — Noise, decay, clamour at shutters As I sleep, and fan blades above me swing In great circles “At the centre of the world, Two halves scraping unequal edges with each other.”

Hunger Some of the men cry, and many of the women Make impossible devotions. Some others Who are neither men nor women go about  eir work invisibly — or else, becoming.

And behind a wall the gymnast (having managed To balance for a very long moment the spectators’ Fear of falling) thinks he sees a spinning wheel And fire in the eye of a monster.  e world Is like this, he says, there is no need For prophesy — it is all here.

Watching this trick was a man in the doorway Now turning to leave and covered with sun.

I notice his quiet walk — the way he steps On his shadow’s toe, liing a foot and balancing  ere each step in the light like a wire artist,  at close to the edge. Out in the streets You can see if you look, the Hunger presents Himself like a man in black suit and bow-tie; A noble savage who’d rather dress than eat.

Epic Red Light up the sky red with a red blaze — not blood red, not even a patriotic flag red that could be politically hazy and scared red — but a brilliant and artificial red like good communists make in factories.  en paint.

Paint the house, embassy, the politicians, dictators, tyrants, all the ordinary people and their comrades; paint them all top to bottom and the middle parts too, especially the penises.

Bright red penises of Russia standing up to be counted for mother country. —And don’t forget the women: the women who take out their finest brushes to paint the red lines in the eyes of their sons.  ey get down on their hands and knees to wipe the paint off the factory floors; they stand at sinks for hours scrubbing the paint spots out of their husbands’ shirts; they wait outside the operating theatre when paint messes the mechanic’s table; they cry

and scream the throat of Russia red-raw till the whole land coughs up blood. Ordinary people understand this sort of red. It’s the red leaders use for wild speculations and artists paint radiant futures with it. Red is an image by itself. Red is hell. Red is unnatural, oppressively hot.

Red like the inside of a mad animal’s mouth. Blood-sucking red.

Red on the screen of the blood film. Historical red.  e colour of revolution red.  e red hammer of education. A red sickle to chop off heads. A shade of red to blame for everything. Women’s red. Menstruation red. Red faces and red sex. Red rage.

Who made the Red Sea red?  e Russians did. Who invented red herrings?  e Russians did.

Who built the pyramids?  e Russians did. Who shot down the Korean plane?  e Russians did. Who made America what it is today?  e Russians did.

“Stroke of the Eye” A woman with beans works Uncomplaining, shuffling them On wooden platters Before the eye Of a prying city Turning to what’s believed Is distant past, Almost forgotten now, Where all remains Unchanged: how long Do we suppose  is stroke of eye Will leave us satisfied With likeness, Or her, With likeness To our unreal world, Not troubled?

Burning Poem You can burn a book but a poem is logically uninflammable. You can burn your love letters, your diary, your house, your volumes of nineteenth century French pornography; any embarrassing, inexplicable, unlikable thing that can burn, you can burn.

You can burn an argument by falling silent, though a word is logically uninflammable.

You can burn the midnight oil, have a burning ambition or burning desire, burn money or burn time. Anything that burns, you can burn.

You can burn your dinner, burn the toast or burn your bra. Burning is a primal power.

You can burn an opinion with censorship, or burn authority by just not doing what you’re supposed to do. —Try it sometime.

You’ll like it. A thing that burns recedes in thought. You can burn Joan of Arc, though the Church will still live, just to spite you.

You can burn parliaments, or the politicians in their cars, but democracy will still haunt you. You can burn Jews but then there would be Nürnberg and unerasable guilt.

Anything that burns or does not burn, you can burn. You can tie a nigger to a tree and go to work with a blow-torch, though there are now some people who would object.

Anything that burns or should not be burned, you can burn. Burning is an absolute freedom.

You can burn someone else, burn yourself, or yourself be burned. You can burn Dresden, or burn Hiroshima, or burn the world.

Anything that burns or should not burn, that you can burn, other people can burn, too.

Death by Drowning 25 years’ culture and girls in string bikinis Crowd in on the tanned skin and muscles Riding the big wave of nihilism.

SISYPHUS on a surfboard. CAMUS In a card-board box. JEAN-PAUL Turning a blind eye on the sex hungry Teenagers paralysed with the sudden emotion Of SENSURROUND, BIG SCREEN, NEW WAVE crashing On the beach of full-colour eternity.

White slides on blue in the corner of the room, And hard-muscled boys, new to the world Of DISNEYLAND mount the wave and dance In the whorl of noiseless oblivion. Late at night Senseless nothings of water and energy roll On and on and over and over dead bodies Banging on the ocean oor. Dawn screams Its new morning service and television Sends urgent messages in static S.O.S. Across the carpet, as half the world drowns In white, frothy surf.

 e Weight of Freedom  ough I did not know you, or your daughters, I know their friends: isobars of pain Have run in lines of high and low through All this isolation — you, your daughters,  eir friends, and me, the line connects us all.

I wonder how it felt, tempting the edge?

I see you spinning, in middle winter, Your body wheeling on the fine ledge, Platform for your final acts.

I can’t remember if it rained that day.

Train and rail and hot engines express  eir sympathy and warn: we are mindless muscle, Taut and hard; we are sorry, but We do not stop for suburbs of the heart.

“All this freedom, my God! What can I do?” — Was pulling you like gravity, merciless And the most natural thing in the world, Toward yourself. How could you resist?

Talking Heads On a walkway between twin towers Of the English Department, someone has a set of drums; Others have guitars, tuba, a clarinet.

Walking through the South Lawn you can see heads Without bodies gathering and talking on the walkway Where now startling music stabs the air.

Inside some secretaries are bothered And tutors interrupted mid-sentence in a novel

By Conrad, with that ungracious sound poised On their commas.  ose musicians up there Come out singing: words fly up off the walkway In a big curve to the heart of light.

—————————S  e ———————— begins to fall, through your mind, through your work, on this page.  ere is nothing you can do to stop the ———————— being ————————ed up against the wall. It is a proposition ready to be executed. It is a joke with no punch ————————, the space between • and • where all your fears and expectations of acceptance fall in a heap.

————————s divide the heart of the matter, and are sometimes -------- or ------- when they drive you to work on Sundays, because you have no job.  e ———————— loses its balance, and begins to fall.

It is your mother. Your boss.

Your lover. You, and every chance you had to be a free man. It is a problem more important than God. It is your problem, as you wait your turn in ————————, thinking about this ————————, where you buy your ticket for the privilege of executing some meaningful state ment, by inserting your name here __________ .

Waiting “there are no barbarians, any more” — cavafy

saturday night and the buffalos are coming like some strange scene in a movie by cavafy, they are coming to eat off civil ised plates and curl their tongues round silver spoons the buffalos are coming and will chew the seams of our velvet curtains then begin to eat us too then swing from chandeliers hung like stars in the deep blue ceiling then touch the wood that touched the shoulders that rubbed the shoulders of important people who ate here once the buffalos are coming as buffalos must, to graze in pastures not fitting their ugly teeth and sitting awkwardly in antique

chairs that o�en break then laugh then try another the bualos are coming, they really are coming, because cavafy was wrong, and cavafy told lies

Report on the Ministers  e day will be mainly fine, with only occasional showers, Which will fall without notice in the most unlikely places, And mostly calm, despite a gale warning in the southern open spaces.  e temperature will be constant, until it rises or lowers, At which time the Gods will do their tumbling tricks, Lighting the sky with grey-and-white movie thrills — You, waiting there beneath them, concerned with how to pay your bills, And they, also concerned with how to run their house, flick On and off celestial switches, governing your life.

Something about them, you see, is difficult to understand.  e weather for one, without the Gods of Fate, might be very bland.

More important than that, do you think you’ll ever understand the strife Your world is in, or the cynical smile that draws across the face Of some starving Ethiopian, every time you take your pen in explanation Of how the world turns and how beautiful flowers are, in versification Of trees and love and everything in everything’s proper place?

 e English Garden for Howard Felperin

A garden or a book, untended, goes on Growing wildly. Exotic flowers, strangled By the weeds’ democracy, drop their seeds And sleep. (I call it ‘sex and death’,  e only subject writers know.)

Reading in the garden, rose and thorn Are coupleted by nature’s random verse.

I rake up heaps of Autumn poetry, Libraries of dried leaf and sentiment.

But critical neighbours sometimes catch me Sleeping on the job. — ey don’t understand It’s harder to write poetry than for dream To pass through the eye of a reader.

Of Clouds and Lévi-Strauss Alas, how is’t with you  at you do bend your eye on vacancy And with the incorporal air do hold discourse?

Clouds, those beautiful fictions, perform tricks Before your eyes that just words shouldn’t: Cloud, ghost, myth or fiction—all the same.

New condensation forms in the unformed air  at ethereal, unstructured whiteness of poetry, Impossible to write, impossible to read; Mindless speech of nature, speaking, without words.

We can only imitate, defy gravity with pride, and fall When raining, soundless, out of heaven’s eye.

Floating on Water At the circular quay huge wooden posts, formerly the trunks of great trees, have been drilled into the sea-bed.  ey support thick planks which, facing out to the bay from the shore-end of the dock, are supposed to protect the quay from boats or small ships that might ram into it.  e planks serve another purpose: to still the water immediately beside the wharf. Pieces of paper, an orange peel and a can move about in one corner. Closer to me, there is a head floating on water.

Big Orchestra What we need is a big orchestra of at least one hundred players.

We should make a surreal painting of our lives and be able to say, as though it were the only true utterance that ever stuttered off our lips: this is what life is like: a briefcase, a glove-box, stuffed full with an enormous orchestra of violinists, cellists, flautists, pianists, organists, trombonists, french-horn-players, clarinetists, timpanists, cymbalists, the whole-bang-lot, that we could open up like a magic box in those quiet moments for which our language has no words. You know the moments I mean, don't you? You could be sitting at a table just looking out the window, or reading a book, or a friend may have just decided that it's time to go home and leaves you, or the music from the record-player may have just stopped, and the room is suddenly quiet, and you then look up from your book or your dinner, or have stopped at an intersection waiting for the lights to change, and then, as though your eyes had been pulled out of your head and taken ten feet away and pointed at you, you see yourself, your whole self, and you wait for something, for anything. A car may pass on the street outside, or someone may make a little sound in the next room, or a fluorescent lamp in a shop window may be flickering on and off, or the books in your room may stare out at you, a company of objects full of meaning no-one entirely understands. And standing there, or sitting there, just waiting there, you become an object. You are the object that arranges for the kettle to boil each morning, the fastidious object that periodically puts other objects back in their proper places, the object that, because it is not entirely without pity, sometimes almost spontaneously, acts with compassion toward some other object, a dog, a cat, a person, and sometime aerwards wonders whether it acted selflessly, and if so, Why? For what reason?  at mad, suffering, ridiculous object which each day opens up its head and tears its brain apart, atom from atom, then throws them into the air, into the darkness.  e atoms are like stars; the space between them the sum of all unanswerable questions. Or else, they are something more humble: specks of dust suspended in a beam of daylight.

Whichever, you are the object standing there, watching, with its arms open to them as they fall. Coming through each day is a

miracle: the atoms, the stars, the dust falling into your arms. It's a miracle how nothing is lost. Each memory persists: the dust and the stars falling into your hands, and all the atoms combining to make you whole again, the complete object, the perfectly still object with not a single word in its head. Words could not explain what it is like to be just a thing, an object. No language has words for such a terrible idea. It is a moment like that when you need a big orchestra; not just a radio or a record-player, but a real orchestra, made of real people and real instruments. You need to have it straight away. î‚Š ere's no time to go out and look for it; it has to be there, ready for you. And then you would want it to start playing slowly and quietly, there at the street corner, or at your table, or in your room: a single violin, or a piano beginning to play so quietly that you tilt and turn your head toward it, before all the others join in, making the music louder and faster, but even then only by slow degrees. It must be slowly, painfully slowly, because something terrible and unforgettable is happening to you. You had lost something and now it is being given back to you.

X equals X When I go into the garden the deck chair that X was sitting in is empty. A book is opened, face down, where her feet should be. I put the glass of water on the wrought-iron table. Light moving through the decorations on the glass and the small bubbles in the water is making an intricate pattern on the surface of the table. I look into the pool: a dark blur, probably X, is swimming — actually, making strange, wriggling movements — several feet under the surface of the water. I sit down and begin to read the book.  e light reflected off the white page is very bright, which makes reading uncomfortable. I close my eyes and rest my head on the canvas strips that form the back support of the chair.

Sunlight shines through my eyelids. X must have been wearing sun-glasses when she was reading, but I didn't notice them on the table.  ey could be under the chair.

When I open my eyes X is still underwater.  e surface of the water is now quite smooth, and the water itself very clean except for a leaf which is floating in the corner farthest from me. Barely discernible, small waves appear on the surface just above the spot where X is spreading her arms; but they quickly taper out to nothing before new ones appear.

X is wearing her new, dark blue bathing costume. When it is wet it looks almost black, just as it looks now from this side of the water. When she reaches the end of the pool X curls up her body into a ball and tumbles over without breaking the surface of the water, then her feet push her away as she starts another lap. Just at the point where she turned, where the pebbled surface of the pool's edge is rounded and dips into the water, there is a large area of that pebbled surface which is wet.  e pebbles and the brownish mortar are darker and shinier when there is water on them.  ere are footprints leading from that wet patch onto the concrete path which goes to the back of the house and the kitchen which has large windows facing out onto the garden and the pool. Whose footprints are they?  ey must be X's footprints.

A few bubbles escape from X's mouth, rise to the surface of the water and vanish so quickly it is impossible to say exactly how.  ey are gone.

Her body is rolling over at the bottom of the pool, like a cylinder would roll down a slight incline except that X is not actually going anywhere. Her arms are stretched out above her head as she lies suspended in the water parallel to the bottom of the pool, and by quick wriggling movements of her torso she manages to make her body turn around an imaginary axis which runs from her head to her feet.  e footprints on the concrete evaporate.  e wet area of the pebbled surface near the pool is gradually getting smaller.

X bursts out of the water; she comes up out of the centre of the pool in one quick movement.  e air escaping from her mouth makes a small exploding sound when the lips open, and the water that is falling down the front of her face and over the lips is suddenly forced outwards, forming hundreds of tiny drops that travel slowly in an arc from her mouth to the surface of the water. X's long hair falls liquidly down the centre of her back.

X stands in the water, almost motionless, for a long time.  e only movement is a slow heaving of her chest and shoulders as she takes deep breaths. Aer a while she moves to the edge of the pool and lis herself out of the water. She seems to be waiting as she looks down at her feet where a large puddle of water is spreading across the pebbles and brownish mortar.

X turns and looks around the perimeter of the pool several times. She's trying to locate something, perhaps the towel. It's nowhere in sight.

She turns around, walks up the garden path and leaves a trail of footprints on the concrete as she goes.  e path makes two swerving movements, first le, then right, on its way to the back entrance of the house, and X follows the centre of the path precisely even though it would be easy to cut across the curves because there is only fresh, green grass on either side of it.

She stops just inside the doorway. Stepping out of the sunlight, she feels quite cold.  ere is a towel draped over the back of a chair in the centre of the room. She moves over to get it and then stands in front of the sink underneath the kitchen's large windows.  e bottom edge of these windows is lined, on the outside of the house, by a shelf which carries about six large pots of azaleas. Standing in the kitchen, looking out into the garden,

the sight of of these brilliant pink flowers resting at the bottom of what could almost be an artist's picture, is always the most striking feature of the garden.  e evergreen trees at the bottom of the yard.  e pale blue water in the pool.  e brownish mortar and small, shiny pebbles around the perimeter of the pool.  e white, wrought-iron table and canvas chair.  e pink azaleas.

X stands at the sink and stares out into the garden. Perhaps she is imagining that she is again walking up the path towards the house.  e footprints leading away from the puddle of water beside the pool are still distinct.

X turns around suddenly.  e telephone is ringing. It makes short, shrill bleeping sounds, not at all like the old-fashioned bell type.

She takes one end of the towel in each hand, swings it up and around her neck, then uses one end to wipe the small droplets of water from her face. With her other hand she picks up the receiver.

“Hello.… Oh, hi! Are you all right? … No. No, she's not here.… She hasn't been around for hours, thank god.… Well, yes.

You could come over now, but I'll be meeting you later won't I? … I do think it's better that you stay away for a while.… Good.…

Well, I'll see you later then.… Goodbye darling. See you then.”

X continues wiping herself as she stands in front of the sink underneath the kitchen's large windows. She puts the towel down on the bench, turns on the cold water tap, and reaches up to a shelf on the wall to get a glass — one of the better glasses with a deeply engraved pattern on the exterior surface. She fills the glass with water and turns off the tap as she gazes into the blue pool.

Standing in the doorway she sees that the footprints closest to the kitchen door have completely disappeared.  e others, closer to the edge of the pool, are still very clear. X turns around momentarily to pick up the glass of water off the bench, and then walks out into the garden.

She sits down on the deck chair aer picking up a book which has been le lying face down on it, and rests her head on the canvas strips that form the back support.

It's a hot, bright day. Oppressively hot. Light passing through the glass is making a striking pattern of faint violet and orange

colours on the painted, white surface of the table. Small bubbles form in the water and cling to the side of the glass.

X opens her eyes quickly.  e hot sun has made her drowsy.

Her facial expression suggests some anxiety, as though she has suddenly remembered an important task which needs to be completed. —But then, just as suddenly, her expression is calm again.

She continues reading.

Hercule Poirot hands M. Bouc a piece of paper. At the top are written, in Poirot's own hand, the words:

Things needing explanation.

Underneath is a list of ten questions. X reads through the questions carefully, then lis her eyes and looks into the pool.  e book is a long algebraic equation.  ings begin to fall into place very slowly.  ere is someone swimming underwater. She can again feel her chest hardening with the strain of holding her breath and can remember how desperately she fought the urge to let that air out of her lungs. When was that?  e body in the pool is tumbling slowly over, several feet under the surface of the water.

She continues reading, but the light reflected off the white page is very bright. She closes her eyes and tries to remember where she put her sun-glasses.  e leaf floating on the surface of the water, the piece of paper on which Poirot wrote his list of questions, a bright, blurry-edged yellow square, all float slowly away in a sea of red.

2

Days Dressed in Dream and Black Wire for Frank Kavanagh, died 27 January 1984

In the heartland the hills move.

Roads shoot through the earth, Turn, then disappear far off.

Our horizon circles leaving no escape; We paint our family red on kitchen tables, Uncertain children tracing questions in a mess.

For thirty years he sat, the centre Of our family’s compass: North, so hills Too steep for grazing, but pleasant enough To look at; South, and the other side Of a languid river, another property, Larger and richer with level ground; Stretching East to West, his oblong piece, Made more interesting by having at one point Where the river turns, a steep fall to the waterline, Large trees, and blackberry scrub which pricked Our legs until they bled, driving us home In an ancient truck, proud of the wounds.

Today, his no-time friends and no-where relatives Have their collars pinned and waistcoats Tight around the grave; all the vegetables Of green and ordered gardens, the photos Of men with beer and women in frocks Are spun into coarse rope.

His pain like a nightmare stretched

Around the farm, fine as barbed wire Fence, enclosing dreams a thousand years.

Outside the farmhouse, our breath Spiralled steam-tubes in morning’s Slow, grey colours of sky and hills:  ere, inside a shed—is his Very private life of rust and disorder, Where the sheep is hung by its forelegs Still, and hot—where a knife draws Lines in blotched skin, and it opens Steaming like our breath Steaming through the still cold air Of this city: clinical and truncated As television murder: with no fire, No blood, lifeless as geometry, As pencilled lines like days of geometry Dressed in dream and black wire.

Our Winter Solstice grandfather was dying and angry i walked with him between the trees plunging sad steel teeth into lifeless timber we sweated remorse for our labour hacking at a pale-skinned gum only to ďŹ nd the core green evening closed the farm gate chained us to the stump of our pernicious and untimely murder thrust angry words in our mouths and brought us home to a rain-washed roof thundering till shattering our obdurate despair so when light and warmth rested in the soil of our farm he did not die

learning never to fell trees in the winter solstice.

Our Life in the Prophesy of E.B. White 1 “ is place was once a potato field; But the sky was no more grey then, Grey slapped on grey over the muddy Soil, on and on, as far as the eye Could squint into its future, than it is Now the farmers are in another country A long way from us. We don’t think of them.

In our gardens we play a game Like fascinated children plunging our hands Into the dirt. It could be potatoes  at we hope to find. It’s not that.

Are we happy here? No. And still, Year aer year we stay clinging To something more than just this Unbearable city: perhaps our work, Perhaps the idea that our imagined life Might sometime happen.… It never does.

A glass bird always looks as though About to fly in our living room.

Decorative zebras graze on our coffee-tables And in our sleep. Travelling is easy; We do it oen in the night. Rude People electrify our silence and consume Us in a colourful haze of merchandise.

Bills and moon, money, love are things For reverie: excited thoughts of a dull life.

Can we love? Yes, it is a love of sorts; And what sort we cannot love, we buy.

1

At the World Trade Fair, 1935, describing the modern home. e place of the poem is Long Island, originally a potato farming area, then the site of a modern satellite town.

 at vision we had is real and always Before us calling us on; real as the dream Of death to a child, tangible as the voices  at call us. We think even as we work Of a great tower piercing Heaven With those dreams: work fills our lives With movements as unnatural to Man As an elephant walking on water— And yet I’m told a man did that once.

Sometimes I believe it. It is a building Of a dream someone has dynamited  at heaves suddenly, and which, Suspended only by a photograph, Must one day fall. But, in among  e clatter of machines that try to choke  e space of my conscious life, I have to belive something. In 1949 We pray, we trust. We’ve done so much.”

Poems from Psychoanalysis I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.

1  e Breach Hide and seek is the game we play, alternating parts, clinging to walls just beyond reach.

Who can live with me? he says, mocking.

Come out. Come out.

Scar says hands on head, to your knees. Scar says shout, then says die.

Scar gives the lie to harmless thoughts, then settles down in the dark house, corrupt little animal gnawing at the heart and baring teeth that cut up memory.

Sleeping and dreaming he’s more alive, feeds on each hurting image, gorged and lying safe beyond the breach.

2 Self and Space Science probes the atom revealing matter mostly emptiness.

Congregations of memory clutter darkness at the heart of things.

Going deeper you and I search the self and fall through infinite space.

3  e Lesson of Eumenides Client “My father’s mother loved her child’s only son demonstrated the fact holding the grandson’s head against her wrinkled milkless breast.

“My father’s father loved his child’s only son demonstrated the fact when he died bequeathing fiy cent scraps of each fortnight’s pension to a trust of his grandson’s name.

“My father’s parents

neither loved each each other nor loved their son demonstrated the fact letting him grow fat on careless marriage, double portions, his and theirs.

“My life repairs mistakes in others’ past blood fighting for the line’s success in life.

It ends with me hate’s puzzle knotting all that should make sense and useless with anger.”

Analyst Ghost and Furies inhabit the temple demanding justice for horrors beyond speech.

Orestes, the son, runs a whole year body dispirited by effort and fear.

I promise protection and equal judgment releases him.

—Athena le to placate Furies’ unearthly rage, revenge-hot blood: “My new city has difficult gods who strike its people down with no warning.

“Will you be the city’s warders? turn your strength to good works?”

 ey accept and in their dark world tie death’s agents down; while in Argos, safe and crowned with light, a murderer is king.

4 Confessional Lonely are the gis I took with me into this death like absurd too many chairs I can sit on only one of them at a time.

I have drawers and chests hundreds of places to stow parts of myself away but you find them a pick in your hand and in my head the case opens.

Your father angers you like a doctor I have books which I open sometimes and do not understand why the lock of my cell is so difficult to open.

In the cell is a horrible creature with two heads

both of them ugly both of them screaming.

Your mother loves you like a priest I have words in my head I never use and places I have never seen gis that were brought I want to refuse.

Gis of rope and knives dressed in striped boxes and coloured ribbons.  ey expect me to answer fulfil expectations they speak to me in a language I never learned they never taught me full of private symbols drawn on my forehead and on my back everywhere I cannot see.

5 Egg Something about them is difficult to touch with their bloody insides awesome and fragile treat lovers delicately

their skin is strong but thin as they move from room to room with their so soft edges like shadows and internal affairs of eggs that at the slightest jolt display their dark insides rich with confusion

6  e King of Hate Years the beast spends dining on his own flesh, inexhaustible passions coming from who knows where beyond the breach.

My arms outstretched find a way through glowing darkness back to where the hate began a life of forgetting, bandaged head, a mask.

Come in. Come in.

He says, this dark house is larger than love, your heart unwired will warm to knowledge of superb pain, will grow to fill its infinite rooms.

He crowns me king of beasts, winds me in red fields and war,

promises all the void will sing my name; if only I would stay.

 e Poetry of Wallace Stevens for Joyce Lee

A voice is a solid thing One hears as though it were built Entirely of air. It is substantial Yet it carves out song from nothing.

A voice is a real thing We cannot move through, that lives Separately, and uniquely sings  e air on which it moves.

A voice reminds us of our distance.

A bad voice is all voice.  e good voice glows and lights  e air on which it throws out song And bites. electrically, the space In which we stand to hear: it alone Is real, and clearly moves between us.  e perfect voice is in the mind And never sings what can be heard; It has a life its own that brings  e sounds the mind has learned To the moment of the keenest singing: Its song is pure imagining.

Mario Giacomelli’s S CANNO 2 It’s 1962. Signor Giacomelli goes out with his camera, His “avocation”. (Probably he had it with him by chance: Who would want to take pictures at this hour?)  e sun half up, he uses flash, for contrast And to brighten faces, but it’s no good.

Two noses and four down cast eyes only faintly appear.

What the matter? Are the women crying?

Has someone died? No. I think they’re always this unhappy.

Aer early mass somewhere in the Abruzzi district, Traditional black coats eclipse the frame  en wander dimly off.

You’ve probably not seen this photograph though It’s very famous.  e title is either something innocent Or implies a sacrifice. And it’s strange  at when you stare into the puzzle for a long time  e little boy in long trousers With his hands in his pockets, hair neatly combed, And a face that shines specially, Head cocked slightly right on top a crisp, white shirt, Descends so nonchalantly on his own Light pathway into this misery.

What is he Here for?

2

Scanno: seat; I cut the throat.

What will he do ?

3

î‚Š e K-Tel Instant Love Poem and Cigarette Machine You say you __________ me but your __________ smile says otherwise.

And waiting like __________ in the __________ , photographs of our __________ become obscene __________ , that tug at my __________ , and __________ and __________ , when solitude draws lines clinical and pale as the __________ of a __________ in the __________ .

You pester me about the way I leave my poems __________ , so they are open to __________ .

Like our __________ love, never __________ , always __________ , in the dark.

When I __________ , it feels like __________ .

Do you remember us in Egypt, on the back of that camel?

Is Sex Important? it sometimes happens we’re discussing the new wave order of things in one of those great fashionable le-bank cafés, imported all the way from the paris end of collins street while reminiscing zürich the homes of modern masters the travels of ulysses and the thousand unrelated explosions at the end of world war one when james my friend orders a toasted roll in the hay, corned beef and a size 38D bust with tomato sauce, and i tell the waitress that a plain ham on rye with no pickle will do for me wonders

aer Invocation we re off to see some movies/a double feature at the uni sex college of prolonged education/with its jeans jumpers t shirts medium length hair & macho moustaches/ & there s this guy on the screen who s wrapping hashish in silver foil like cadbury chocolate/& smuggling it across the border until he gets caught because the authorities in turkey are really into catching chocolate smugglers/there s a moral here/& it s in the next movie/ where rae desmond is the new jesus christ/grown 2000 yrs old of donkeys & philistines/steps off his fat 500cc BMW/& with all the christian love of a man about to prove a point/commences to bash the shit out of a bondi surfie/ who said his pomes weren t punk enough!

—pour it on rae/pour it on!

Connibalismia All this is mere shadow in the light of the great god (price), or the prince (efficiency).

See her moving there?—graceful! lovely! a soul yes—as shining as clean floors like ice, flitting on it—a dancer— she, Eve of the western economy, romantic fulfilled and he, her Adam, with whom she dances that pulpSmith of desire— Embraces her (holy (mother!), a patriarch a lover, a monster of greed, green all over— o! a Hancock, just dripping with it —small change and wet promises.

How stunning! how aesthetic! (10 out of 10 for delivery, and a plaque for joie de vivre—) they are while dancing.

Just like a photograph of the balls of modern capitalism—Marx in a supermarket— Hegelian hamburgers—eastern suburban mysticism— it’s so unOrthodox and yet so satisfrying: chopped liver and onion go nice with TV; cliché Lorraine?—why not? (for supper perhaps);

aer all in bed the hot sands of Africa glow, the crumbs of breakfast biscuits tickle their bums—; incongruous, unexpected, delightful passion thrills them; enlightenment, all electric, Pure and Simple— non stick, no mess, no fuss; very modern, fully adjustable, perfect marriage—range of colours.

Bananas You stare deep into the doctor’s eyes as he explains the wholemeal path to nirvana and weight loss/so you decide to open a restaurant/and the house is a shower of oranges and cucumber.  ere are loud parties in our bathroom every night/thin people with yellow skins stand around the hot hot water faucet/discussing fruit and permaculture.  e neighbours complain incessantly about the volume of your apple records/and in the morning i see the prunes under their eyes/and sympathise.

You rearrange the furniture of our home to comply with newly discovered natural rules of organicaesthetics/the banana lounge comes in from the rain/and you fondle your mangoes in the bean bag.  e restaurant and four years’ love beside the gas oven have not improved your cooking/spices are still the variety of life.

Every saturday outside the mastercut butcher shop/you give public demonstrations of the sensitivity of tomatoes and onions.  e performance brings tears to the eyes of every passer by/and the butcher stands watching/munching on his steak and kidney pie. Daytimes/i wander aimlessly through the streets of brunswick/stopping for a moment at the gates of a heavenly fish ’n chip shop. I have problems with my saliva/in the frozen meat section of the supermarket. I stand there for hours/caressing legs of ham/which is the closest i will ever get to a good old fashioned meaty thigh. People think i am crazy. Your attitudes to sex are so missionary. Why can’t you love me/like a pork chop?  ere are days when i crave for egg. You throw parts of me away/in green plastic garbage bags/the roots of cabbages/the jackets of potatoes/and every evening you hull my strawberries for supper. I am turning into a banana/no/i am turning into a bunch of bananas. I need group therapy. My emotional life is an interminable fruit salad. I have ectoplasmic fits/and cosmic zucchinis/and my butternuts shiver in your freezer.

Ode to John Tranter  is morning a soggy newspaper on your doorstep announces that all Australia has become a suburb of Melbourne, Sydney is just a dream and Queensland a form of neurosis which will go away if you try hard enough.

And you think it’s going to be one of those days.  e Labor government you elected is somewhere to the right of Ezra Pound, the only Liberal you know has started to wear pink t-shirts and that operation Peacock had was really a sex change.

But it’s not just the politics— only 9am, and already the next generation of new poets is bleeding loudly on the airwaves and a little voice inside your head tells you, “Les Murray can’t walk on water.

You must believe me!” and you know it’s true

but what waves it would cause if he tried!

You realise suddenly that it must be an Overland day! because you can’t see any women in your kitchen except one on the back of a packet of corn-flakes, and even she’s only a token, but no, perhaps it’s a Quadrant day? aer all it is their government that’s in power and Barry Humphries still looks good in a dress.

Under the shower you try to forget everything that’s gone wrong, to wash away you unemployment like indelible ink or freckles.

So it may be just another boring day, a Hansard day, or

an Age Monthly Review day and you could sit in front of the bar-heater smoking pages of the Times Literary Supplement one by one and learning to write by osmosis or spontaneous combustion, because you don’t give a damn about cancer or mixed metaphors or your neighbour’s dangling participles— you just want to be a famous artist and have the government (any government) proclaim you a living national treasure so you won’t have to beg for food from the Australia Council Soup Kitchen, so the Literature Board will send you a leather jacket and every Monday a carton of tailor-mades and a six-pack of Coke will arrive by certified mail and you could do John Forbes or Gig Ryan rip-offs, in public, and no-one will know you’re faking it!

In fact it may be a Scripsi day because only one hour aer you thought it was an Overland day there still aren’t any women in your life

and you always wanted to travel by proxy, except that you couldn’t tell the difference between Michel/e Tournier and Butor if it hit you over the head with a bi-lingual dictionary and no-one you know would dare speak Swedish in polite conversation.

No, it’s definitely not a Scripsi day but it could be a Meanjin day! because you’ve always wanted to go fieen rounds with an editor who thought (s)he could make the lame see and the blind talk and you know if you submit a poem to anyone from Melbourne University there’s always a good chance the empty gin bottle will stop spinning at your name, and that bonsai-epic verse about the forces of light and darkness you sent will be read by every socialist household in Moonee Ponds.  en it hits you! a kind of existential panic only West Australians are really familiar with—

it might not be any kind of day at all, it might be a Going Down Swinging day when nothing happens and years pass you by like artistic brain-damage or Sisyphus in a Maserati.

No, no— it feels like one of those days, a day for writing odes to John Tranter when all the most beautiful and irrelevant words in the world sing with one voice in praise of poetry and their own impotence, a day when Jacques Derrida is a brand of ice-cream or any drug that melts in the mouths of poets, when not being yourself is a pleasant change, a day for cleaning the sky of static and all those bleeding hearts, and you step out on the world singing: Heaven is my woman’s love,  at’s the place I want to be.

Heaven is my woman’s love,  at’s the only place for me.

Love (perform allegro con brio)

when i fell its got to stop its because im afraid of what it might do to me if it does stop and im not ready to feel its got to stop because i might be pulling myself silly and the time when its got to stop might never come when i feel its got to stop i take long walks under the sky under the words i le� hanging in the air when i feel its got to stop i eat bran and read logic so my conversation wont feel like an early mornings constipated pushing and groaning in the toilet when i feel its got to stop im too polite and ask if i can interject your logorrhoea like rubber suppositories or cigarette buts in the kitchen sink when i feel its got to stop i tell you i dont love you any more and mean it for at least as long as it takes me to say it and when you do think i mean it i want to die when i feel its got to stop i call you at three in the morning and ask for a fuck and you give me the address of a friend whos out of the country and wont be back till next year when i feel its got to stop i wont come at to your parties because i dont like talking philosophically about the aristotelian origins of wittgenstein and i dont understand how the tractatus can teach me to say i love you without farting when i feel its got to stop its because i still love you enough not to want you to know that i feel its got to stop because when i feel its got to stop

when i feel its got to stop its because the six doughnuts of our love aair werent enough and a�er checking the contents of my box one last time you guiltlessly replace my sweaty body on the supermarket shelf between the baked beans and the chicken noodle soup when i feel its got to stop i get lost in the city mapping the tedious plan of streets waiting for the place where the pain and sorrow of our last argument will fall out of the night and tear my guts apart leaving me to survive till morning by licking the remains of our last sensuous rain out of the gutter when i feel it got to stop its because im afraid of what it might do to you if it does stop and youre not ready to feel that its got to stop because you think that the time when its got to stop should never come

Being Sunday She was a religious woman; but despite that, we were quite happy most of the four months we “lived” together. I remember distinctly, it was the 105th day, eight o’clock in the evening, and I was feeling romantic and said to her, “I love; do you love me?”

Being Sunday, it was New Testament day. Not liing her head, but merely giving evidence of the irony of poor timing, she read aloud from St Paul’s Letter to the Romans, “My own behaviour baffles me. For I find myself doing what I really loathe.

Yet surely if I do these things that I really don’t want to do, it cannot be said that ‘I’ am doing them at all—it must be sin that has made its home in my nature.”

She was a queer woman. I am sort of glad now that she has gone to meet her maker.

 e Possibilities of Language “… ey’re perhaps not suited to our kind of publication, with its emphasis on exploring the possibilities of language.”

He explores the possibilities. Regularly. In this regard, at least, he is very regular. Someone said once that nobody ever had a really good idea while writing in a large room — so he is exploring the possibilities of proving this theory correct while seated in the smallest room of his house.  ere are many ways of approaching the problem. He thinks. Should he at any time in the near future begin to have a large idea, what then should he do with it? If it is a specially large idea, it may demand taking to a slightly larger room, to give it space to develop and mature.  is is interesting.

He thinks about John Milton. If John Milton were with him the room would not be big enough for both of them. John Milton was not a big man, but he had big ideas. John Milton wrote about god.  ere is no way anyone could fit John Milton and God in the same, small room. He decided to start with something smaller and see how far the thing will grow before he has to move to a larger room. He thinks about Babel, because he is thinking about language. He thinks about God, but only for a moment. Ideas like that are difficult to sustain. He thinks about bananas, because the room he is in reminds him of bananas. It is a purple room. He thinks about Babel again, and then he thinks about bananas, because they sound good together. Like peaches and cream.

Suddenly, a scenario evolves in his head.  ere is a man.  e man is in a car. It is a small car. No. He starts again.  e man is in a banana.  e man is in a large banana, eating a car. It is still a small car.  e man is munching away on his ripe, yellow car and quite happily enjoying the scenery. John Milton knocks on the window of the man's four-wheel-drive banana and says, “Ah…hello. My name's John Milton. I was wondering if you'd like to spend some time discussing the possibilities of language with me?”  e man thinks for a while, takes another bite off his car, and says, “John, I'd really like that, but I don’t think this banana is big enough for both of us.” “Well,” says John, realising that this is a valid problem, “I have a large peach parked across the road. I’m sure that it would be large enough to accommodate our ideas, at least to begin with.”  e man says, “OK,” and gets out of his banana.

He looks across the road and sees the peach. It’s enormous. An American peach with mag wheels and GT stripes along the side.

Even more incredible is the fruit which it is towing.  e man stops, amazed, and stares. “It’s so big!?” he says. “Oh, yes,” says John, “peaches are just fine for love poetry, but for God I need a watermelon.”  e man and John enter the peach.  ey talk about love.  ey talk about peaches.  ey talk about love, again.

Which leads them to politics. Which leads them to Marx. Yes, they even talk about Marx, and they are still quite comfortable in the peach.  e peach is large. Marx is not large enough. Marx was a big man, but his ideas were smaller than a peach.  eir conversation comes to a natural pause, which is what oen happens to conversations about Marx, and John looks at the man, and the man looks at John, and John looks back at the man and asks, “By the way, my good man, what is your name?”  e man begins to panic. He thinks way back to his childhood.  ere is nothing there. “I don’t know,” he says. “For as long as I can remember I have always been called  e Man.” “But if you are  e Man,” says John, “then you must be the Son of God!”  e peach seems altogether far too small.  ey are standing at the door of the watermelon. John opens the door. Inside the watermelon is red and juicy. John looks in through the door and says, “It is sad, isn’t it? I have been eating this watermelon for 300 years and it is still not finished. I sometimes think that I will be eating it forever. Almost every aernoon I come in here to eat and let the juice run down my neck. I work at it very hard.

Whenever I find a pip I write an epic poem and I think about God when I spit it out.” John reaches inside the door of the watermelon and pulls out a box. It is full of pips. “What I really want to know is, will you help me eat the watermelon? I think that it is nearly half eaten, so that if we work very hard we could be finished in a hundred years. By that time we will have written a thousand epic poems and there will be enough space in here to consider the universe. What do you say?”  e Man looks into the watermelon and He is hungry, so they start to eat.  ey eat for a hundred years or so.  e juice runs down their necks.  e juice is everywhere.  ey write epic poems and consider the possibilities of God.  ey spit the pips into the box. When they have finally finished eating the watermelon, they consider the universe. And they think it is sad. But determined that 400 years of writing epic poems and thinking about God will not go to waste, they bundle

the pips into the back of the peach and drive to Milton’s farm in the country where they plant the pips in the ground and grow watermelons. But John and the Man have had their fill of the red, juicy universe, so they decide to eat nuts instead.  ey sell the watermelons to other people who wish, against their best advice, to explore the possibilities of infinite things.

 e Living Room You see, it is just like walking through the door of a city hospital; the doors slide back automatically. With beautiful music in the background, you could almost be a film star on the set of a well produced American soap opera; but you have not quite decided yet whether you are doctor or patient. A directory on the wall reads: Surgery — 4th Floor. You take the elevator. Stepping out, a thin, red line guides you into a stunning steel room. Sinks line the walls, and canisters of fragrant antiseptic soap are attached to them; it is just like home: harmless, clean. Walking into the well lit living room (that is what doctors like to call it), a comrade of many years motions you closer to the operation, and says: “Would you hold this for me? I won’t be long.”

It's disturbing.  e meaning of this episode strikes you suddenly: you are just a visitor here; you came to wish a sick friend well; you didn't expect to be given his heart.